Founded in Oxford, England in 1984, Verse is an international journal that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. The print edition publishes portfolios of 20-40 pages, while the Verse site publishes book reviews and individual poems. Verse is edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.

Friday, December 07, 2007

Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages. The flotation a person settles is an ear in sound where appearances give us their all. Bringing focus to the flagstones, early morning walk and I’m doing nothing. The hole where lights are seen. Star in a vise so we experience headache. This gives us the brightness we reflect onto others—faces yet to be grown, the walk still needing to be taken, another imprint on awareness. Things don’t begin the way they used to—if we gaze into linear reverse we see that death has preceded us.

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Arena pieces in electric city maw. Behold my hand, itself a sinister word, an invention marred by its own relation to departures: giving the boat a push, counting down, a wave farewell… See you when the arena is rebuilt, I’ll say my first word then.

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He had never once used those words, nor even learned to handle the instrument that would’ve made their written form possible. The words in question were discovered in a volume formed in concentrically rippling circles, flat like a sundial. Between each letter there rose (or was it emanated?) a fragrance that could be seen by those standing at a slight angle to the page. The curls and indentations this fragrance left in the air was enough to cause the onlookers to be paralyzed. If all hallucinations could be true, and not only a matter of physiological perspective, the world and its words would be held captive by a possibility of olfactory interpretations and reinterpretations lying over the seasons like a palimpsest of the brain’s canals during monsoon.

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A cloak of linen, the back of a hand, a falling through space shows what musculature has given us over the years, years spent listening to the walls of a room that speak with an exhaling known to grant favors. An adherence symmetry avoids, feeling pitched to a previously unknown elevation. The dandruff of stars because they are a desert breed, something we didn’t mind shouldering at the time. Not like the weight that accompanies expeditions like these—quietly in a house of sonorous doors and thresholds opening onto amber hills where caretakers divine water with crossed eyes.